It's interesting that Google and Apple seem to be converging on this issue (ad-blocking extensions) even though they're probably coming from two different directions.
Google probably wants to discourage ad-blocking because it's a threat to their business model. Apple just dislikes not having full control on what the users run (and sometimes for good reasons, they probably want to avoid malware extensions). Still, in the end they both end up with subpar ad blocking facilities as a result.
Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again. And no I don't consider forks of Chromium to be reasonable alternatives in the long term, at least until those teams prove that they can maintain a deep fork of the browser on their own which will be necessary if they need to maintain functionality that Google removes from upstream.
> Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again.
For me it's always been, I've used Firefox without pause since it was called Phoenix. I know there was a small exodus to Chrome when it had better parallelization, but as far as I know Firefox is leading on that front again.
So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features? I'm obviously biased as I never left for competition but I don't have any complaints, neither on desktop nor with the Android version.
Same here. Crazy to think that I've been using it for over 15 years and never had a reason to change. I've tried other browsers, but none of them gave me a compelling reason to continue with them.
I think the most probable reason for that has been the complete support for addons that no other browser ever did. For instance, why doesn't Chrome have support for vertical/tree-style tabs without using a separate window? That one feature alone keeps me on firefox. By removing the tab bar at the top of the screen, you regain a significant amount of vertical space on a laptop.
> That one feature alone keeps me on firefox. By removing the tab bar at the top of the screen, you regain a significant amount of vertical space on a laptop.
Last time I tried tree tab, it wasn't possible to remove the tab bar. Has this changed? And if so, would you mind sharing how to do it?
>
So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features? I'm obviously biased as I never left for competition but I don't have any complaints, neither on desktop nor with the Android version.
On Windows or Linux, IMO there is no competitive advantage on Chrome vs Firefox; However on macOS, Safari has a very big competitive advantage that Apple has done lots of integrations to macOS; it’s not just something like IE where Microsoft used private APIs to be the default browser; but that macOS users tends to have a big bias on native apps developed with the Cocoa API, with a native looking interface.
Both Chrome & Firefox is a cross platform browser that really doesn’t really care whether the macOS version is integrated well, hence having a very outstanding look compared to other apps.
Honestly, the thing that makes me go back to Safari every time is the interface. And this is coming from someone who used to speak about Firefox in open-source events like Latinoware.
While Safari feels like home, Firefox looks horrible — seriously, what is up with that border-top-color on each tab? And the black border around white icons on the light theme?
Yes, you can fix anything using userChrome.css — heck, you can make it look exactly like Safari —, but each update breaks some pieces of your CSS file, which after a while becomes quite annoying.
If it's on top, it's the currently active tab. I'm not sure on the black border around white icons, I don't use the light theme.
Tab groups are the colored borders, very handy if you use containers. That's one of the killer features to FF, if I'm in a Google, Facebook or Amazon domain I'm isolated. Then when I click an exit link or anything not categorized, I'm in the default container. It's stress-free browsing for me as I got tired of seeing online entities pick up things about my life that it shouldn't have had access to.
I also like Safari (and Edge). I've been using FF since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left, FF is the only browser popular with the features I think balance out the energy efficiency improvements of native browsers.
>So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features?
The former, I also use Firefox as my main browser (and have been doing so for a long time). I worry that it may not survive in the long run if its market share remains so low.
That being said the latter might also be true for Mac users as apparently it suffers from performance issues (it's even mentioned in the Github issue linked). Fortunately it seems that it's going to be fixed in the not-so-far future.
I was one of those users that switched to Chrome for a while (5-6 years, probably). I've now switched back to Firefox. My only frustration is that some sites don't work as well (or, occasionally, at all) on Firefox as they do on Chrome. Not surprisingly, Google's own sites are often the worse culprits.
I've used alternative sites when necessary, though. Bing Maps is actually fairly decent.
While not as full featured and it still forces you to GMaps or Bing for directions, DDG uses Apple Maps. I like this for a quick lookup and then full on GMaps for directions if necessary.
I think Apple may still be acting with privacy in mind, as opposed to being controlling. Extensions do pose a risk to users when they become popular enough, and there have been examples in Chrome where an ad company buys an extension and embeds tracking into it, or otherwise encourages the author to embed ads.
It doesn't invalidate the other motivation for wanting extensions to be published in the app store, of course, but I think the privacy use-case is sound.
You don't think Firefox is a worthy competitor at the moment? I've used it quite happily in the last few years, but would be interested in what you think its shortcomings are. I know there is supposed to be a power drain issue, but I haven't noticed that personally. Apart from that, I'm not aware of any major issues.
There's an 8 year old issue in Bugzilla for this.[1] The Firefox team has finally put some resources into fixing it, but progress has been slow. I'm not holding out much hope -- Chrome has had this feature for a long time and it's never worked quite as well as Safari's.
A Firefox multi-touch zoom extension also exists[2], but it's not smooth enough to be useful to me (admittedly, this is on my old and slow 12" Macbook).
Firefox preexists Chrome by like, six years (2002, 2008).
Firefox stems from Mozilla (1998) stems from Netscape Navigator (1994, originally).
Chrome stems from Blink stems from Webkit (Apple's thing, 2001ish) stems from KHTML (KDE, 1998).
Amusingly, all the historical parts of the Chrome stack are basically still around. You can install recent versions of Safari and use Webkit, or install recent versions of Konqueror and browse the web with KHTML (although development has lagged since 2016).
Google probably wants to discourage ad-blocking because it's a threat to their business model. Apple just dislikes not having full control on what the users run (and sometimes for good reasons, they probably want to avoid malware extensions). Still, in the end they both end up with subpar ad blocking facilities as a result.
Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again. And no I don't consider forks of Chromium to be reasonable alternatives in the long term, at least until those teams prove that they can maintain a deep fork of the browser on their own which will be necessary if they need to maintain functionality that Google removes from upstream.